Yesterday was Alan's last day at school. He was very
emotional about
saying goodbye to his friends and teacher. But that evening,
we went
to sushi to celebrate his graduation from kindergarten, and
ran into
one of his classmates. He worries a lot about making
friends, but he's
actually very social, much more so than either Heather or me
at his age.

Max is going through another great leap forward in language
development. As I blogged recently, he's working on
irregular
verbs. A few days ago, he said, "I broked it. I broked it. I
broke
it." You could read it on his face - "not quite right. Nope.
Aah,
nailed it!". This evening, he said "I dropped my bottle. Put
it over
my legs." And, touching the scotch tape I used to repair our
copy of
Goodnight Moon, "something sticky." It's only been a couple
of months
or so since most of his utterances were single words.

He's also very advanced physically. He can now kick a soccer
ball
well, in the direction he wants and with some force.
Also, he
blew my away by announcing "circle", then folding
his collapsible sunshield into precisely that shape.

Alan had a similar language burst at almost the same age
(25.5mo).
Actually, we have to be very careful about marvelling at
Max, because
it makes Alan feel jealous. We reassure him about how smart
he is, and
how proud we are of him, but he still expresses a lot of
doubts.

Keys

Wes briefly forgot
his ThinkPad's BIOS password. This kind of thing happens all
the time
to real people. I commented on the need for far more
sophisticated
rituals for guarding keys, with both social and technical
aspects.
It's a hard problem, and it clearly can be done in both
peer-to-peer
and centralized flavors. Governments and evil corporations have a lot
of
motivation to pursue the latter. I'd like to see more
thinking on
decentralized approaches.

Of course, at the heart of the problem is the fact that it's
all but
impossible to securely store a key on a general purpose PC.
Ry4an Brase pointed to a really
neat toy. This
particular
model is a bit limited (in particular, if you lose or break
it, you're
hosed), but I think more specialized hardware like this will
play an
important role.

Cheap parts

A few people have expressed interest in getting a dual
Athlon system
similar to spectre.
One question that came up: is generic RAM actually any less
stable or
reliable than the "name brand" variant? I really have no
idea. If you
were going to get a gig or more, the price difference could
be
significant. I chose not to take the risk, but I have a
feeling that
it's probably mostly a marketing strategy on behalf of the
"name
brands." For example, I know that Apple SDRAM, at $150
for a
256M PC133 SODIMM, is no different than Crucial's at $69.99
(including
shipping). The question is whether it's any more reliable
than the $38
part from Pricewatch. (side question: why the hell did Apple
put a
SODIMM socket in the iMac?)

Again, I think this would be a killer app for a trustworthy
metadata
system. What if almost all generic parts were good, but
there were a
few suppliers that weren't. Wouldn't it be cool to actually
know
that? Also, if people had a good place to report stuff like
drive
failures, I think information about lemon products would
disseminate
much faster.